Photographier Zermatt : les pratiques photographiques des touristes à l’épreuve du numérique

• Main Author: Ellina Mourtazina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Éditions Touristiques Européennes 2019-06-01
• Series: Mondes du Tourisme
• Subjects: digital photography; touristic practices; performance; Zermatt
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/2148

As digitalization has brought major transformations to the way individuals engage with photography, research focusing on tourist practices and performances has often disregarded the essential dimension of technology. Based on an ethnographical account of tourists’ behaviours in the Swiss ski resort Zermatt, this paper aims to understand different dimensions of the photographic doing by drawing attention to the way tourists master, negotiate and embody new digital potentialities during their photographic performances. Throughout a detailed description of the micro-instants that rhythm tourists’ digital photographical practices, this analysis conceptualizes contemporary photography as an aggregate of embodied and reflexive practices, which encompass social norms, aesthetic codes, embodied sensory practices, digital materialities and space.